Below is more from Information Management’s Webcast by DM Radio, “The Last Mile: Data Visualization in a Mashed-Up”. This Webcast was hosted by Eric Kavanagh and included BI consultants William Laurent and Malcolm Chisholm, and InetSoft's Product Manager Byron Igoe.
Eric Kavanagh (EK): Well, I am glad you brought in Flash and Silverlight because I have got this long history with Flash, and I’ve always been impressed with what it can do, and of course recently we’ve all seen this whole row between Adobe and Apple, with Steve Jobs saying no, we’re not going to support Flash. We’re not going to have any kind of plug-in architecture at all, which seems to be going back in the other direction, in reverse. Alex, what impact do you think that is going to have on data visualization, this move by Apple to thumb their noses at Adobe?
Chiang: What it boils down to, the only person who is losing out on this is the end user. They’re going to have to choose one specific technology platform and stick with it. And potentially, the technology platform might not satisfy all the business requirements that they might need.
EK: Well, you see those broken icons and they just drive me crazy. I thought at first with my iPhone, you just have to download the plug-in, but no. Malcolm, let’s face it standards really do enable interoperability and agility and so forth, yet they really seem hard to adopt. What do you think about this concept of Adobe and Apple not getting along, and what impact is that going to have on mashups and data visualization?
Malcolm Chisholm (MC): Well I don’t think it’s good. But in the end some standard will emerge. I think there is plenty going on at the moment. There’s a lot of promise that can be turned into reality right now. I’d just like to go back to your earlier point about the evolving role of IT. That discussion reminded me a lot of the work I have done with business rules and business rules engines, where you try to move something over to the end user and let them take over roles that were predominantly IT. The one thing IT can do well and does support is testing. Now there is no reason why a mashup is going to be just right. So IT can maybe help users in the testing arena, making sure everything is correct, checking the output, checking the results that they are going to interpret. I think that is one thing that they can do. That also frees IT up from its traditional way of working as well, but it is a competency that IT definitely has.
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